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missroserose{Note: I want to have some sort of excuse for not updating recently, but the best I can come up with is "I've been trapped in Colorado with my Mormon cousins", and that would imply that I'm willingly spending time with them. So that excuse doesn't really fly.}
{Addendum to Note: Okay, so they're not all that bad. Mostly it's just that I've been thinking about a lot of things, and therefore kind of unsure about what to put down. More on that later.)
The entire time I've been here in Colorado, I've had exactly three emails - two anonymous comments on my last entry, and one junk mail. Even the spammers seem to know that I'm not online as regularly as normal. It feels odd...sort of like being forgotten by the world. I'm not trying to complain or anything, but it might be nice to get a "Hey, how're you doing, hope your Mormon cousins haven't converted you yet" from someone. Of course, my most faithful correspondent (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eventhewaves) is currently located in California with no furniture or computers, things seem to be less than warm with Ian, and neither Ryan nor Monica have email, so...I guess that sort of cuts out on the whole correspondence thing. Woe is me.
I think I was a bit hard on the subject of marriage in my last entry, so I'm taking a few paragraphs that I wrote in response to one of the comments there and putting them down here, if only so my views on marriage are fairly represented:
As far as marriage goes...while I don't think it's pointless in and of itself, I do think that, in its current form, it is certainly an anachronism. The days of marriage as an institution to protect and support helpless young women are (mostly) behind us, as there are very few men (or women) out there willing to totally support their spouse. After all, equal rights are a double-edge - with equal rights come the expectation of equal responsibilities, and women (now that we've proven ourselves able to contribute to society) are now expected to make their own way in the world, even though the societal structure they must function within is still inherently male-designed. (I have a whole other rant about this that I'll probably post another day.)
However, what a lot of people don't realize is that, in order to survive as an institution, marriage needs to evolve. A lot of people still associate getting married with having someone to take care of you; while this is certainly the case to an extent, it is no longer the driving force behind marriage. A marriage should take place when two people have spent enough time together to see themselves grow and change, to see the best and worst sides of each other, and attain enough maturity to weather the ups and downs. Without this, and with our society's tendency to take the easy way out, almost any marriage is doomed to fail. There's a reason that the longer people know each other prior to making the leap, the longer the marriage tends to last. (There's also an interesting statistic - with the exception of abusive relationships, about half of divorcées wish that they'd stuck with their marriage. So while half of marriages fail, it could also be said that half of divorces fail, too.)
When they know each other this well, marriage stops being a social relationship based on caretaking and procreation and becomes a partnership between two people. While the fuzzy side of love does not last, and every up does have an impending down, the opposite is also true - when you learn to shovel yourself out from all the emotional crap instead of throwing it at each other, and hit the top again, the feeling is all the stronger because you know you've worked for it; the sense that you're undeserving, so ubiquitous throughout the first stages of love, vanishes, and you know that you've built something beautiful.
I've often asked myself why marriage should even enter the equation, since obviously this kind of relationship is something that can happen with or without a piece of paper with your names on it. The best I can answer is that marriage should be a contract not with your partner, or with the state, but with yourself - that you're going to stick with this person throughout all the storms that things go through, not because you're afraid of being alone, but because life is so much richer when you have someone to share it with.
I probably sound like a romantic, but this is based on both my observations and my experiences. I have met couples who have been together nearly their entire lives from fear of being alone, or because it was expected of them; I have also met couples who have been together for decades because they really, truly care about each other. I can certainly tell you the kind of relationship I'd prefer to have. Of course, given my current success with relationships (detailed to an extent in the rest of this blog), I'm not sure if it's something I'll ever actually achieve. ;-)
So that's pretty much my philosophy of marriage. What threw me about my cousin Emily was mostly that she was making this sort of decision at my age, which seems to me a little young for that kind of commitment. However, having met her and her fiance, I'm revising my estimates of their chances of success a bit - they've apparently known each other a few years, and while they still are very much in the first stages of love, they also both have the support of their family and church, which can make a big difference. The fact that they're both devout Mormons also decreases the likelihood of divorce, though I usually don't consider a "staying together for the sake of the kids/family/church" relationship a success.
It was sort of interesting when Emily asked for the rundown on my life - she took it pretty straight-facedly (though admittedly I was trying to not shock her too much), but her reaction was something like, "Wow. Your life is pretty different from mine." No, really?
Something interesting, though, that's happened since I got down here - I've turned into an utter and total introvert. Usually I like to be somewhere with people if not the center of attention, but the past few days have found me avoiding crowds, usually by reading or pretending to sleep. I'm not sure why exactly this is, but I think it's probably from a conglomerate of reasons; for one thing, this is Emily's special time, and I don't want to do my usual "steal-the-spotlight-from-everyone" type thing that I usually do; for another, I really don't have that much in common with most of my family any more, which makes talking to them rather difficult at times, given how I despise shallow relations; for yet another, I've got a lot of stuff going on in my own life that I need to think about objectively, and sitting here in the middle of a Mormon community that's pretty traditional and generally about as different from my life as possible is helping with that. Partially because it gives me a chance to not have the rest of my life distracting me, and partially because it gives me another perspective from which to look at things.
One of the things that Emily asked me once I'd given her the rundown on my life was this: "Does your life make you happy right now?" or something to that effect. Normally I would have said "yes" right off the bat, but to tell the truth, I feel like something is missing at the moment. Sure, there are moments when I'm happy, but I generally don't have a lot of joy. This could be because of my lack of religion (side note: one of the books I picked up on this trip is "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft", which is turning out to be an interesting read); it could also be from my fluctuating relationships and seeming inability to commit to something solid.
But I think those are really more the symptoms of something else: right now, I really don't have a lot of direction in my life. I've got vague aspirations for a psychology degree, little to no idea what I'm going to do after that, and two very different sexual relationships that I can't seem to decide between. I have no idea what sort of career I'm looking for, what kind of house/neighborhood/city I'd like to live in, what kind of family I'd like to have, etc...to put it bluntly, I haven't figured out what it is that I want. And since my general guideline for living is to figure out what I want and then go for it, this is severely cramping the joy I usually get out of life.
So what do I want? I'm having an easier time describing what I don't want: I don't want a huge family, I don't want to be conservative, I don't want to have an ordinary life. Except that last isn't quite so well-defined anymore; lately, I've met plenty of people with lives that could be considered "ordinary", and they seem happy enough. And considering that I don't have any real idea on how to make my life non-ordinary, maybe I should just aim for the usual job-husband-kid-car-house deal.
But I don't know if that's what would make me happy. I'd love to be rich someday and be able to afford to eat at expensive resturaunts and go on cruise ships and whatnot, but I'm not naïve enough to believe that that alone will make me happy, either. I'd like to have a husband and a couple of cats and a nice house and maybe a kid, but that alone won't make me happy. So what will?
I'm going to have to think on this a while.
@->--Rose
{Addendum to Note: Okay, so they're not all that bad. Mostly it's just that I've been thinking about a lot of things, and therefore kind of unsure about what to put down. More on that later.)
The entire time I've been here in Colorado, I've had exactly three emails - two anonymous comments on my last entry, and one junk mail. Even the spammers seem to know that I'm not online as regularly as normal. It feels odd...sort of like being forgotten by the world. I'm not trying to complain or anything, but it might be nice to get a "Hey, how're you doing, hope your Mormon cousins haven't converted you yet" from someone. Of course, my most faithful correspondent (
eventhewaves) is currently located in California with no furniture or computers, things seem to be less than warm with Ian, and neither Ryan nor Monica have email, so...I guess that sort of cuts out on the whole correspondence thing. Woe is me. I think I was a bit hard on the subject of marriage in my last entry, so I'm taking a few paragraphs that I wrote in response to one of the comments there and putting them down here, if only so my views on marriage are fairly represented:
As far as marriage goes...while I don't think it's pointless in and of itself, I do think that, in its current form, it is certainly an anachronism. The days of marriage as an institution to protect and support helpless young women are (mostly) behind us, as there are very few men (or women) out there willing to totally support their spouse. After all, equal rights are a double-edge - with equal rights come the expectation of equal responsibilities, and women (now that we've proven ourselves able to contribute to society) are now expected to make their own way in the world, even though the societal structure they must function within is still inherently male-designed. (I have a whole other rant about this that I'll probably post another day.)
However, what a lot of people don't realize is that, in order to survive as an institution, marriage needs to evolve. A lot of people still associate getting married with having someone to take care of you; while this is certainly the case to an extent, it is no longer the driving force behind marriage. A marriage should take place when two people have spent enough time together to see themselves grow and change, to see the best and worst sides of each other, and attain enough maturity to weather the ups and downs. Without this, and with our society's tendency to take the easy way out, almost any marriage is doomed to fail. There's a reason that the longer people know each other prior to making the leap, the longer the marriage tends to last. (There's also an interesting statistic - with the exception of abusive relationships, about half of divorcées wish that they'd stuck with their marriage. So while half of marriages fail, it could also be said that half of divorces fail, too.)
When they know each other this well, marriage stops being a social relationship based on caretaking and procreation and becomes a partnership between two people. While the fuzzy side of love does not last, and every up does have an impending down, the opposite is also true - when you learn to shovel yourself out from all the emotional crap instead of throwing it at each other, and hit the top again, the feeling is all the stronger because you know you've worked for it; the sense that you're undeserving, so ubiquitous throughout the first stages of love, vanishes, and you know that you've built something beautiful.
I've often asked myself why marriage should even enter the equation, since obviously this kind of relationship is something that can happen with or without a piece of paper with your names on it. The best I can answer is that marriage should be a contract not with your partner, or with the state, but with yourself - that you're going to stick with this person throughout all the storms that things go through, not because you're afraid of being alone, but because life is so much richer when you have someone to share it with.
I probably sound like a romantic, but this is based on both my observations and my experiences. I have met couples who have been together nearly their entire lives from fear of being alone, or because it was expected of them; I have also met couples who have been together for decades because they really, truly care about each other. I can certainly tell you the kind of relationship I'd prefer to have. Of course, given my current success with relationships (detailed to an extent in the rest of this blog), I'm not sure if it's something I'll ever actually achieve. ;-)
So that's pretty much my philosophy of marriage. What threw me about my cousin Emily was mostly that she was making this sort of decision at my age, which seems to me a little young for that kind of commitment. However, having met her and her fiance, I'm revising my estimates of their chances of success a bit - they've apparently known each other a few years, and while they still are very much in the first stages of love, they also both have the support of their family and church, which can make a big difference. The fact that they're both devout Mormons also decreases the likelihood of divorce, though I usually don't consider a "staying together for the sake of the kids/family/church" relationship a success.
It was sort of interesting when Emily asked for the rundown on my life - she took it pretty straight-facedly (though admittedly I was trying to not shock her too much), but her reaction was something like, "Wow. Your life is pretty different from mine." No, really?
Something interesting, though, that's happened since I got down here - I've turned into an utter and total introvert. Usually I like to be somewhere with people if not the center of attention, but the past few days have found me avoiding crowds, usually by reading or pretending to sleep. I'm not sure why exactly this is, but I think it's probably from a conglomerate of reasons; for one thing, this is Emily's special time, and I don't want to do my usual "steal-the-spotlight-from-everyone" type thing that I usually do; for another, I really don't have that much in common with most of my family any more, which makes talking to them rather difficult at times, given how I despise shallow relations; for yet another, I've got a lot of stuff going on in my own life that I need to think about objectively, and sitting here in the middle of a Mormon community that's pretty traditional and generally about as different from my life as possible is helping with that. Partially because it gives me a chance to not have the rest of my life distracting me, and partially because it gives me another perspective from which to look at things.
One of the things that Emily asked me once I'd given her the rundown on my life was this: "Does your life make you happy right now?" or something to that effect. Normally I would have said "yes" right off the bat, but to tell the truth, I feel like something is missing at the moment. Sure, there are moments when I'm happy, but I generally don't have a lot of joy. This could be because of my lack of religion (side note: one of the books I picked up on this trip is "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft", which is turning out to be an interesting read); it could also be from my fluctuating relationships and seeming inability to commit to something solid.
But I think those are really more the symptoms of something else: right now, I really don't have a lot of direction in my life. I've got vague aspirations for a psychology degree, little to no idea what I'm going to do after that, and two very different sexual relationships that I can't seem to decide between. I have no idea what sort of career I'm looking for, what kind of house/neighborhood/city I'd like to live in, what kind of family I'd like to have, etc...to put it bluntly, I haven't figured out what it is that I want. And since my general guideline for living is to figure out what I want and then go for it, this is severely cramping the joy I usually get out of life.
So what do I want? I'm having an easier time describing what I don't want: I don't want a huge family, I don't want to be conservative, I don't want to have an ordinary life. Except that last isn't quite so well-defined anymore; lately, I've met plenty of people with lives that could be considered "ordinary", and they seem happy enough. And considering that I don't have any real idea on how to make my life non-ordinary, maybe I should just aim for the usual job-husband-kid-car-house deal.
But I don't know if that's what would make me happy. I'd love to be rich someday and be able to afford to eat at expensive resturaunts and go on cruise ships and whatnot, but I'm not naïve enough to believe that that alone will make me happy, either. I'd like to have a husband and a couple of cats and a nice house and maybe a kid, but that alone won't make me happy. So what will?
I'm going to have to think on this a while.
@->--Rose
